Ratio of dried, homegrown hops to pellets

[Eigenbrau]

I've dug around, and maybe it's my choice of wording, but I either find conflicting answers or none at all.

I've homegrown some Cascade and Willamette hops this year and have already harvested several ounces from each plant, dried them out, vacuum sealed them, and thrown them in the freezer.

My question is, if a recipe calls for 1 oz. of Cascade hops, I assume this to be pellets. Would it be proper to utilize 1 oz. of dried, homegrown hops as well, or is there a conversion somewhere that I'm missing? I can't seem to find a solid answer. If anyone has any experience with this, I'd really appreciate it.

 

[Suthrncomfrt1884]

1oz of hops is 1oz of hops....no matter what form they're in.

 

[jaobrien6]

1 oz of 5% cascade is 1 oz of 5% cascade. Since you don't know the AA% for your homegrown hops, you need to decide what AA% you want to use as an assumption. It's possible you might want to adjust the amount of hops you use because of that, depending on the AA% the recipe calls for.

 

[david_42]

Unless you are trying to use them for bittering, it doesn't matter. There is a small difference between pellets and whole, but very few people could detect it in a beer.

 

[cactusgarrett]

The value I keep turning up is +10% by weight. As in, if you were to use whole hops for a recipe calculated with pellet hops, 10% more whole hops would be needed (given a constant aa%) to obtain the same IBU value. So, 1.0oz of 5% Cascade pellets = 1.1oz of 5% Cascase whole.

Beersmith confirms this, too - when i tweek a recipe for whole versus pellet, as the IBUs increase when set as "pellet". The main reason i've heard, which makes sense to me, is that when pelletized, the lupulin is more readily accessible than in the whole hop form due to the complete physical breakdown of the pellets during the boil.

Though, as david suggests, in using a lower amount of whole hops, the slight IBU difference (from pellets) in the perceived bitterness might be below the threshold of human detection.